Privacy Policy

Peoples Bank of East Tennessee recognizes the importance you place on your privacy and the security of your personal information. We value your trust and our goal is to protect your personal information in every way that we interact with you, whether it is in our lobby, on the telephone, at one of our ATMs, or on the Internet.

We feel that it is important for you to be fully informed of the policies, procedures and security measures we have in place to safeguard your personal information. This policy has been development to explain our commitment to maintaining the highest possible level of security, privacy and confidentiality to protect your personal information.

Definitions:

We, our, and us means Peoples Bank of East Tennessee

You and Your means all of our consumer customers who have a continuing relationship with us, such as: Deposit Account, Loan Account, Credit Card, or Self-directed Individual Retirement Account where we act as the custodian or trustee.

Nonpublic personal information means information about you that we collect in connection with providing a financial product or service to you. Nonpublic personal information does not include information that is available from public sources, such as telephone directories or government records.

Affiliate means a company within our family of companies. It is a company we own or control, a company that owns or controls us, and/or a company that is owned or controlled by the same company that owns or controls us. Ownership does not mean complete ownership, but means owning enough to have control.

Nonaffiliated third party is a company that is not an affiliate of ours.

Q. What type of customer information does Peoples Bank of East Tennessee collect and how do we collect it?

A. Customer information includes all of the information about you that we collect in the course of providing or offering our services to you. Customer information may include information that would also be available from public sources, such as a listed phone number; and it may include non-public information such as:

Information we receive from you on applications, other account forms or emails (ex. Name, address, social security number, income, etc.)

Information retained from your transactions with us or others (ex. Account balances)

Information obtained from a consumer reporting agency or other creditor (ex. Credit history information)

Information generated electronically when you visit our website and use our Internet Banking and Portal Services

A. We do not sell or disclose any nonpublic personal information about you, former customers, or website visitors to anyone, including nonaffiliated third parties, except as permitted by law.

Q. What information is legally permitted to be disclosed to third parties?

A. The following are examples of certain circumstances when customer information may be disclosed to third parties as required or permitted by law:

Information may be disclosed in the course of administering your day-to-day banking business with us, such as to process a transaction requested, initiated or authorized by you. For example, if you request credit life insurance in conjunction with a loan, applicable information will be disclosed to the insurance company. We may also share applicable information with a bank-approved appraiser or attorney in order to facilitate your loan request.

Information may be disclosed to service providers so that we may process your Internet Banking transactions.

Information will be disclosed about your credit history with reputable consumer reporting agencies.

Information will be disclosed as required by law. We will comply with customer information requests through properly executed court orders, such as garnishments, levies, summonses and subpoenas.

Q. Do we disclose your medical or health information that we may obtain?

A. We believe that any medical information that you provide to us must be protected. Therefore, unless you specifically authorize its disclosure, we will not disclose any medical information, except as permitted by law.

Q. How does Peoples Bank of East Tennessee safeguard customer information?

A. We take a number of steps to protect the privacy of your customer information. For example:

We maintain physical, electronic and procedural controls that comply with federal regulations to safeguard your personal information. These controls help keep information from being changed or destroyed, help prevent identity theft and protect your confidentiality.

We restrict access to nonpublic personal information about you to those employees who need to know that information to provide products or services to you. We educate our employees about the importance of confidentiality and customer privacy.

Our Internet Banking Service provider has also developed security policies and procedures to protect the customer information that they must collect and maintain to help us process your banking transactions over the Internet. They have developed a top-of-the line security system to ensure your customer information is protected on the Internet and within the data center environment.

Q. How is your privacy protected when using Peoples Bank of East Tennessee’s Internet Banking and Bill-Pay Services?

A. Our commitment to safeguard your privacy also extends to the Internet.

If you are just browsing through our website, we do not request any personally identifiable information, nor do we collect unique identifying information about you unless you voluntarily and knowingly provide us that information. If you provide us this information, it is only used internally and in furtherance of the purpose for which it was provided.

Service providers hosting our website and Internet Banking service may collect general information on our website visitors simply to help us provide banking and other financial services to you online. They may collect information on our behalf for security and statistical purposes. This information may include: the internet address that brought you to our web site, the date and time your access our site, the name and version of your browser, the internet service provider you used, your internet protocol address, and the pages visited in our website.

Our Internet products use the latest encryption technology to secure your data over the Internet. Encryption is the process of transforming data into a form unreadable to anyone except those who possess the decryption key. For your protection, we use 128-bit encryption throughout our Internet Banking Website. We also use digital certificates of authority to ensure that when you access our secured website, you are actually communicating with Peoples Bank of East Tennessee and not an imposter. At sign-on, you are required to enter your AccessID and Passcode (which is displayed in asterisks when you enter it). To prevent unauthorized access to your accounts when you step away from your computer, your Internet Banking session automatically signs off after 10 minutes of inactivity. However, it is best to sign-off or close your browser after completing your banking session.

We offer secure email through our Internet Banking Service. You should use the secure mail service anytime you send us sensitive personal information.

Our website may contain links to other third party sites. These links to external third parties are offered as a courtesy and a convenience to our customers. WE ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR THE PRIVACY AND SECURITY PRACTICES OR THE CONTENT OF LINKED THIRD PARTY SITES.

Q. How does Peoples Bank of East Tennessee protect the privacy of children online?

A. We do not knowingly collect names or any other personally identifiable information from children. We do not knowingly market to children. Our website is specifically intended for users at least 18 years of age or older. We will not knowingly collect personally identifiable information from children without having verifiable parental consent before collecting such information.

Q. How are you kept informed of our Privacy Policy and any changes to it?

A. We provide you with a copy of our Privacy Policy when you open a new account with us. We will provide our current customers copies of our Privacy Policy on an annual basis. We may change our Policy, but if we make any major change we will tell you. You may be notified by email telling you where the Privacy Policy can be viewed from our website, if you agreed to accept disclosures electronically. The most recent Policy is always available on our website at http://www.peoplesbank-tn.com.